The Cambias Digression

Notes and thoughts on everything from what I had for breakfast to the fate of the Universe.

  • Ozblogging: The Road to Oz, Part 2

    Dorothy and Company arrive at a very odd village. It's inhabited entirely by anthropomorphic foxes. The fox-people are initially suspicious of the newcomers, but the power of the Love Magnet quickly turns that to friendship. Our heroes are conveyed to the throne room of King Renard IV, the ruler of the foxes, known to his…

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  • Ozblogging: The Road to Oz, Part 1

    The Road to Oz is the fifth of L. Frank Baum's immortal Oz series, published in 1909. Like its predecessor Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, it follows Dorothy on another difficult journey to Oz with a group of entertaining companions. Sure, by this point it's a formula, but it's a winning formula and Road…

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  • Novel Writing Month, Take 2

    Well, all right, I didn't make semi-regular reports on Corsair. Unless one simply posts "I wrote more stuff today" there isn't that much one can say if things are going well. And if things are going badly, it seems even more pointless to post "I didn't write more stuff today." I've been managing between 500…

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  • Novel Writing Month, Take 1

    I'm normally very leery of things like "National Novel Writing Month," but since I am in the middle of writing a novel I thought I'd make use of the opportunity to make semi-regular reports on what I'm doing and how much progress I'm making. Our story so far: The book I'm writing is provisionally titled…

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  • Story Alert!

    My story "Object Three" is in the November/December issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Alexander Jablokov described this story as a bonsai space opera. It's got romance, shootouts, aliens, a big mysterious object, and people jumping out of spaceships. I just got my sample copy of the issue and it looks great.…

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  • How I Did It #8: “The Vampire Brief”

    Since Halloween is only a couple of weeks away, it's appropriate to tackle my first horror story, "The Vampire Brief." It's another anthology story, written for the collection Odder Jobs, published by Dark Horse Comics. As the publisher name might suggest, the stories in Odder Jobs were all based on a comic book: Mike Mignola's…

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  • When Metaphors Attack!

    Science Fiction has a problem. The problem is that it is (among other things) a literature of prediction. Writers extrapolate future worlds and new technologies. A huge part of the genre's appeal is simply seeing what the future might be like. The trouble with predictions is that either they come true, or they don't, and…

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  • How I Did It #7: “See My King All Dressed In Red”

    This was the first story I wrote for an anthology, as opposed to a magazine, and it's also the only story of mine (so far) which has come true. "See My King . . . " was written for the anthology Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic, edited by F. Brett Cox and Andy…

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  • Fantasies of Freedom

    I've been thinking about stories lately (actually, I always think about stories), and something has occurred to me. In many stories — especially in genres like science fiction, fantasy, and thrillers — one of the attractions is that the protagonists are more free than the reader. Sure, they may be faced by evil overlords or…

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  • Lazy Thinking

    This past weekend I was a guest at the storm-wracked PiCon convention in Enfield, Connecticut. I had a good time, and I hope others were entertained by my presence. I'll be going back next year if they'll have me. So now I'm going to be exceedingly ungracious. At the various panels I attended, I noticed…

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The Worldbuilding Index